That iPhone In Your Hands Almost Looked Like A Complete Mess Of A Device

You may love your iPhone these days for many reasons; how pretty the interface is, the sleek lines of the body, maybe how it just all pulls together so nicely. However, that wasn’t always the case with Apple’s iconic smartphone.

It was almost a horrendous piece of garbage.

A soon to be launched book titled “The One Device: The secret history of the iPhone”, digs into the early days of the iPhone. You may take your aluminium and glass design for granted, but an excerpt from the book showcases that back in the day Apple had some questionable design choices for its first smartphone.

In 2005, Apple had recently partnered with smartphone giant Motorola to put iTunes on its Rokr phone. Unfortunately, the results were less than appealing to Steve Jobs. According to Merchant, Jobs in fact told Apple exec Tony Fadell, “This is not gonna fly. I’m sick and tired of dealing with bozo handset guys.”

Fadell even states this may have been the final push that convinced Jobs to have Apple build its own smartphone. Unfortunately, Apple had no experience with building a smartphone, though it did have a lot of success with its iPod. So that’s the direction the company took.

“We put a radio inside, effectively an iPod Mini with a speaker and headphones, still using the touch-wheel interface,” iPod’s hardware chief at the time David Tupman, told Merchant. The result was... less than palatable. An Apple patent from 2006 shows what looks like an iPod Mini, complete with scroll wheel interface, not a touch display, and a rotary phone-style dialler.

Jobs himself seemed to like how it turned out, and Apple even reportedly manufactured a few hundred of the devices. However, Apple’s engineers (thankfully) thought it was a mess. “It was just obvious that we were overloading the click wheel with too much,” iPhone engineer Andy Grignon told Merchant. “And texting and phone numbers — it was a fucking mess.”

Blessedly, the company eventually did away with the ridiculous design, in favour of the touchscreen you’re familiar with today. Think about that the next time you grumble about how small keypad buttons are.